Ready or Not

There is a timeless choreography to California wildfires. A fire always is said to have moved faster than anyone ever had seen before. “Weary firefighters” slog through every newspaper dispatch, battling “wind-whipped” flames and “tinder-dry” conditions. Fire bureaucrats fatefully tabulate blackened acres, as though the count somehow matters. And always cameras come to rest on a representative victim poking through the ashes of a lost dream. The shot tightens and, peering red-eyed into the camera, the dazed unfortunate is asked to express how it “feels, when it happens to you.”

On Monday, one day after a big fire had kicked up behind town, everyone here seemed to know the script. In front of Bill’s Rough & Ready Market, firefighters, no doubt weary, lounged on cots and exclaimed they’d never seen a fire move so fast. Residents rounded up lost dogs, and spoke of blessings. State information officers posted “fire updates,” listing acres burned, structures lost, houses “saved.”

Inside the market, proprietor Bill Baumgart provided out-of-town reporters with obligatory color. He told how the town, situated in the Sierra foothills north of Sacramento, had been named by a Gold Rush 49er who fought under Gen. Zachary (Old Rough and Ready) Taylor. And how the miners, angry over taxes and drunk, had seceded from the union in 1850, only to abandon the rebellion in order to partake of traditional Fourth of July debaucheries.

When the storyteller was finished, the news crews fanned out to find a suitable victim. This led them to Gaylene Collins.

*

A short, husky woman, Collins leaned on a crutch as she stood among the ashes. Her faded blue T-shirt and cotton shorts were covered with smoke. Her face was red, and her soot-filled hair tied in a bun. She’d been up all night. Her parents pushed a paper plate of Red Cross spaghetti her way, but the 42-year-old Collins wouldn’t eat. Instead, as the satellite trucks rumbled in, she performed her part. She told her story.

She’d torn her knee apart not long ago, cleaning out her Caltrans dump truck. Sunday afternoon, she fell asleep exercising the knee in her mobile home. She awoke to the smell of smoke. She hobbled out, spotted the flames coming toward her lot, called 911 and cleared out. “I knew that was it,” she said. “It was over.”

From a nearby hill, she looked back and watched. The fire roared through the historic Rough and Ready schoolhouse she’d bought eight years ago. She was going to live in it. Renovation of the structure, built in 1868, was to have begun in a week. Next, the fire took out the trailer house. It burned down a shed where her husband, a logger away at work, kept his tools. In the shed was a 1965 Kenworth. She showed the reporters a snapshot of the well-polished logging truck, “Old Blue” painted across its door. “It was,” she said, lovingly, “the prettiest truck on the road.”

Now, she began to sob. The camera operators leaned in closer. “What does your loss mean?” a television man asked. She didn’t seem to know how to answer. “Once history is on the ground,” she said finally, “it doesn’t come back up very well.” This seemed to satisfy. The cameras pulled back. It was time to shoot some b-roll of the smoldering ruins.

*

In truth, beyond the colorful dateline and rustic setting, there was nothing much special about the Rough and Ready fire. It was not a big one, as California wildfires go. After taking out the Collins property, the fire--started by a tree branch striking a power line--burned across 500 acres, destroying about 10 structures. By late Monday, bigger fires already were burning elsewhere.

What was noteworthy about the fire, though, was when it happened. According to the script, wildfire season doesn’t open in California until early September. This fire jumped the gun by a month. It spread fast, not because of strong winds, but because drought has left the brush and trees exceptionally brittle and dry. Like firewood.

“It’s a real early season this year,” said Don Gannon, chief of the Rough and Ready Volunteer Fire Department. “Real early. In terms of how dry things are, and in terms of the weather, it’s like we are in September already. It’s scary. Real scary.”

And it is this way all over California. And if there is a message to be taken from the Rough and Ready fire, it is simply this: Get used to the script, get ready for more fires. Because, ready or not--and far too early--the burning season has begun.